Our thoughts are powerful. In our minds we can do anything. Making our dreams reality requires the power of believing they can happen. So many people see the glass half empty, but there's no hope in a pessimistic attitude. Life is all about possibility. I've always wanted to start a blog and I've wasted a lot of time thinking about it. But now, I've finally put my thoughts into action, simply, because I can ...

Monday, 2 April 2012

It's not our fault.

It’s not our fault that we were born, but the fact that we came into the world makes us significant. Life is a miracle and living here on earth is filled with good and bad experiences. One of our purposes in life is to learn how to cope. Another purpose would be to help others cope.

If we want to be happy in life, we need to remember the golden rule, which is given to us in the Gospel of Matthew (7:12): "In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you." We also know, from reading the Bible, that "there is more happiness in giving than receiving" (Acts20:35).

These verses are very important, but life is hard and sometimes, even when we are kind to people and we extend ourselves to help them, the acts of kindness and consideration are not reciprocated. How does this affect us? It makes us negative and we question our purpose of helping others. Yet, the same can be said about us by others. Are we always willing to help? We may think that we are doing the right thing, but how do others perceive our behaviour or attitude?

No-one in life is perfect. Each one of us has some sort of burden that we carry. When we learn to support each other, through the good and bad experiences, we also help each other to handle the weight of that unique burden. Of course, the way we handle our burden differs from someone else who seemingly has a similar burden to carry.

It’s not our fault that we are who we are. From the moment, within our mother’s womb, that we were able to experience life, our brain has absorbed information and stored it. Throughout our childhood, when we were vulnerable, we were formed and fashioned according to different experiences and our personal reactions to them. We were influenced to experience emotions, but there wasn't always someone there to help us deal with the emotions and our reactions to them. There wasn’t a real support system for us to help analyse and understand what we were experiencing. Whether they were good or bad, we just had to cope. Our minds were conditioned to think positively and negatively. We either learned to tolerate or fight against the negative influences and experiences, or we learned to ignore or thrive on the positive influences and experiences. Whichever we did, our thoughts have made us who we are today.

Our biggest problem in life is that we underestimate ourselves. Our minds, for example, are amazing. We never think about it, but our minds are like sponges. Our minds have stored up so much information, all the information and experiences that we have ever heard, seen, felt, touched, smelled and tasted. All that information and all our experiences are inside our heads. Sometimes in life we experience something that has an incredible effect on us and we don’t know why. It’s because somewhere in the back of our minds there is a similar experience that happened in our past, which had either a good or bad effect on us. The emotions we struggled with back then suddenly re-surface and we are forced to deal with the present situation, while a past situation has not yet been resolved. The past situation doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad one.

Many people hate themselves and their lives because of the emotional storm that brews within them. They don’t understand how they feel or why they feel the way they do. They are overwhelmed by negativity and criticize themselves, other people, situations and life in general. They become figuratively blind and learn to break down even the good things in life. They learn to appreciate nothing and eventually respect nothing. They learn to lead an ungrateful and selfish life.

We all have inner power. It is the most incredible thing. We can use it to change the way we think and behave. We can use it to help ourselves and others cope in life. If we are truly motivated, we can do anything we believe. Unfortunately, so many of us don’t believe enough. Our power of belief is so weak that we learn to give up before really trying to do anything.

We all have a passion. It's this passion that is supposed to drive us and make our lives worth living. Without passion, we often miss the whole purpose of having to cope in life ... and even more so, the purpose of helping others to cope. That's why so many people succumb to depression and anxiety, and eventual break down. We need to find our passion. If we take the time to be patient with ourselves, we will discover what it is.

There is a saying: "To know other people is intelligence, but to know yourself is true wisdom." Keeping this saying in mind, we need to focus on discovering and developing our passion before we can go out and really make a difference in the world. The reason why we don't understand ourselves is because we believe we have no time. Time is very valuable. Once it's spent, we cannot get it back. While we believe we have no time, we may need to ask ourselves what it is that we're busy with. We have so many choices. Every day we have the choice of allowing laziness, technology, addictions, lust for money, the lives of other people and our work to control your time. We spend so much energy focussing on these things that we lose control and our focus in life. We neither know who we are nor do we understand why we are.

If we take some time to sit alone in a place that is beautiful, in absolute quietness, we will learn to discover what really makes us happy. We will discover what our passion is. If we make our passion the central theme of each day, we will find the strength to live a life with purpose.

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About Me

I am a high school teacher. I teach English as a first and second language in a small town in Limpopo, South Africa. I am married and have two children. I've written four books.
1) Pop-In Jay Pomp (children)
2) Mareijke's Courage (adventure romance)
3) The 6th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill (murder mystery)
4) The Power is Yours (teen motivation).
My motto in life is: You are what you constantly think. I live by these words. The thoughts in a person's mind are powerful: they can create, motivate, encourage, disillusion and destroy. The art of thinking lies in the power of a positive attitude. This is the true weapon to success.